"Condescension can coexist with more positive features."

"And it did, with many of them. I have the highest respect for the Elves I've known."

"I think I'm glad I landed near Himring and not Nargothrond, when I first came here. I wouldn't have taken well to being condescended to."

"I think m'lord King, judging by how well he gets along with Thingol and Melian and got along with the Valar in Valinor, does not condescend to powerful people."

"I'll have to take your word for it until I meet him."

"And I'll have to take yours on whether your Elves condescend to the less powerful."

"Yep. Guess I'll have to work as hard as I can on teleportation so both of us don't have to take each others' words longer than necessary."

"How long do you think it might take?"

"I'm not sure. I was working on it a little at home, and I'm much better at Sympathy than Conquest and I can do Conquest teleportation, but I was working on a lot of things at home and none of it was a matter of life and death like it is here. It might take months if I'm unlucky."

"As far as the Elves are concerned that's very immediate."

"I know, it's ridiculous."

"They sat there besieging Angband for four hundred years, and weren't decided if it was time to attack it."

"To be fair I can sort of understand why one would be spooked about Angband but still."

"I don't think they'd have won. But still, four hundred years is a long time to just wait and hope a magician drops out of the sky."

"I'd be flattered if I thought they were expecting me. I don't know what in partcular they were thinking, tactically--my knowledge of military strategy boils down to 'so apparently I can kill balrogs and dragons'."

"M'lord King expected that we would lose and all be killed."

"That's not going to happen," she says firmly. "Whether it would have happened if my sister and I hadn't shown up I can't comment on."

"Nor can I, but I think his assessment was warranted."

"It's kind of weird that I'm actually really glad someone tried to murder me but if I hadn't fled in a panic I wouldn't have ended up here, so."

"...you're going to have to tell me more of that story. Someone tried to murder you? Who were you back home, how did you learn all this magic?"

"Oh, yeah, I haven't actually told you very much about this stuff. So I grew up in Genosha, which is basically a city centered on a university for magic. Most mages are, you know, limited in how much magic they do by the mental side-effects and the fact that it hurts. But--resistances vary, and people who have really high resistance to at least one of the kinds of mental side-effect and also a good way of dealing with large amounts of pain can do nigh-arbitrary magic and are called Great Mages once they get strong enough. I have a really fantastic Sympathy resistance and--mind magic leaves you open to way, way stronger side effects, don't use mind magic unless you have a really fantastic resistance or need to do something to your brain badly enough to completely remodel it. Anyway I do have a really fantastic resistance and I installed masochism and I'm going to be a Great Mage and I was attending the university and one of my teachers who doesn't think anyone should have as much power as a Great Mage does decided to try to kill me before I got that far and my sister because she was a witness. I grabbed her and teleported away blindly and ended up near Himring. She ended up somewhere in the general vicinity of Fin--Prince Fingon, I guess."

"Does teleportation generally have that much spread?"

"Not generally, but to the best of my knowledge the fact that we landed in what appears to be a completely different universe is totally unprecedented, so it's possible there's some interaction there."

"Are there Elves on your world?"

"No sapient species whatsoever save humans."